In this free course, we try to teach you all the various options and features of a standard PrestaShop installation. We will explore all the settings and features to show you the true power of PrestaShop and also its bugs and lack of features in some cases. There is a video version of this tutorial on our YouTube channel that we strongly recommend you to watch so you'll make sure you don't miss anything.
Video guide:
By default, PrestaShop has one theme and a hundred modules and you can install more themes and modules to fit your needs and expand your shop. But first, we need to get to know the Admin Panel of PrestaShop, only then can we customize our shop the way we want.
PrestaShop back office
Step one is to connect to the admin panel aka PrestaShop back office (BO).
PrestaShop back office is the name often used to describe the administration panel of a PrestaShop store. You will spend most of your time in this panel, as everything that the user sees is handled directly through the back office:
- Adding/editing/removing products
- Handling carriers
- Building packs
- Creating vouchers
- Keeping contact with customers
- Improving your shop
- etc.
As I mentioned in the first tutorial of this course the name of the /Admin folder has to change. If we don't change it, PrestaShop will change it for us the first time we visit that page. This is done for security purposes and is one of the nice features of PrestaShop. This action is not that easy in some other scripts and in some, it's not possible to change the admin folder name. So everyone will know the address of your admin panel. Here with PrestaShop, you can change it anytime you want to anything you want.
Login to BO
Now if you remember your admin folder name, use it to access your shop. If not, just go back to your hosting panel, Cpanel, Direct Admin, etc., go to File manager > public_html, and see the admin folder name. Then just add it at the end of your domain name like this:
You will see the login page for your back office. Enter the email address and password that you registered with when installing PrestaShop. Check the box shown in the following picture, stay logged in, and click on the "Log in" button.
Congratulation, now you are logged in to the back office of your shop.
Discovering the Administration Area
Now let's get to know the admin area. Let me start with the top bar.
In the top left corner, you see the PrestaShop logo. Clicking on this logo will take you to the dashboard page. Next to it is your current PrestaShop version.
Quick access
Then the quick access menu. As you are going to spend most of your time in your back office and may need some pages more than others and there is no direct access to those pages from the menu here, you could add those pages to quick access. Let say you need to add a new photo to the slideshow module every day or every week. Instead of going to modules > module manager > searching for the slideshow module and clicking on configure, you just click on a link in the quick access menu that takes you to the configuration page of the slideshow module.
How to add a link to the quick access menu? Just visit that page and from the quick access menu select "Add current page to quick access, name the link, and click ok.
You could always manage your quick accesses by clicking "Manage your quick accesses" link in the access menu. You can add a new "quick access", edit a current "quick access" or delete one from this page.
You can also set each link to open in a new tab if you want, simply by clicking on this red icon. When it turns to a green check it means it will open in a new tab.
The order of these links is alphabetical. If you want to change the order you could for example add a number before the name. Go to manage quick accesses > edit and add "01-" before the name and save. You'll see that will be the first link.
Search bar
Next is the search field. This lets you search for anything in your back office. Just type and press enter.
Icons
On the top right corner, you see some icons.
1. View my shop: This one takes you to the front office in a new tab.
2. Bell icon: The bell icon which usually has some numbers on it is for your store notifications. The new order, customer, and message notifications will show up here.
3. Trophy icon: This trophy icon is for the gamification module of PrestaShop. It's a basic module that tracks your progress in configuring your shop and has some suggestions for you. In the beginning, you may find it useful. But we are going to cover every option and feature in PrestaShop so you don't need this. You could always disable or uninstall this module especially when you publish your site to the world. We'll talk about installing and uninstalling modules later in this course. Let's get back to discovering the admin area.
4. Profile icon: The last icon is your profile menu. Here there are two main links. Setting your profile and sign out. The other ones are links to PrestaShop resources and help center.
Your profile
By clicking on "Your profile", you could edit your account information. First name, last name, email address, and password. You can also change your default page. This page will be displayed just after you log in to your back office. If there is more than one language in your shop, you can set your own default language for the back office.
For changes to take effect, click save.
And obviously, the sign-out link will log you out of the back office.
The Menus
While working on your shop, you have to browse through the pages of the back office. In PrestaShop 1.7, the menu has been categorized into 3 main sections. From the pages you use the most to the ones you use less often.
Dashboard is the homepage of the back office. Where you see some details and live statistics of your shop.
Sell
After you publish your online store and start selling products or services to customers, this section is where you go each day to get your business going. Catalog, customers, orders, customer services, and stats are the main menus of this section. Every one of them has some submenus which we will cover later, one by one.
1. Orders Once clients place orders, you will see the list of orders, invoices, credit slips, delivery slips, and also shopping carts. You can see if the shopping cart has converted to an order or it's just abandoned.
2. Catalog This is the heart of your shop, where you will add products, create categories, set up brands and suppliers, define discounts, and other related activities.
3. Customers Here you can access all the information about your clients, and edit their addresses.
4. Customer service Where you handle customer service and anything post-purchase: merchandise returns and order messages.
5. Stats This menu gives you access to all the statistics that are gathered and generated by PrestaShop modules on your site. Some of them are very useful and others are just using up your server resources especially if your website traffic is high. We'll go into the details of this subject later in this course.
Improve
In this section, you will find everything to customize your shop. From managing modules and the look of the front office to payment methods, shipping, and localization.
1. Modules Here is the page to install, update configure, and in some cases uninstall a module. More than a hundred modules are available by default and you can install as many modules as you need.
2. Design Here you can handle themes, static pages, the position of modules on your theme, and image settings among other things.
3. Shipping Everything related to carriers and shipping cost.
4. Payment Based on your target market you can choose your payment methods and set restrictions for each module based on currency, customer groups, country, and carriers.
5. International Helps you customize your shop with local values, such as language and translation, currency, taxes and tax rules, regions, countries, etc.). It's a piece of cake to make a PrestaShop website, multilanguage. With a click of a button, all the necessary content for a language and a country will be imported. States, taxes, currencies, languages, units. You also have the option to add a custom currency to your shop. Let's say bitcoin.
Configure
It is divided into two submenus. The first one is your shop parameters. You’ll find here all the settings you need to configure when you launch your shop. Once you made your initial choices, you won’t go there very often. The second menu can be seen as the technical section, with more advanced settings that aren’t used often either.
1. Shop Parameters PrestaShop is a very configurable e-commerce solution, and you can edit just about any of its behaviors using these full-featured preferences. Orders, products, customers, and SEO.
2. Advanced Parameters This menu contains links to tools and informational pages that are too specific to fit in other menus, such as the Web service settings, the database backup tool, or the performance page. This is also where are the settings about the back office itself. Like managing employees' accounts and their permissions.
These are the default menus and some of these menus are further divided into pages with tabs that you need to pay attention to when you are looking for something. For example, if we go to the general settings in shop parameters, you see that there are 2 tabs. General and maintenance. And each tab has a different set of options.
The buttons
Many of the back-end pages use buttons, either at the top or at the bottom of the screen. The available buttons vary a lot depending on the context, and therefore two different pages might not feature the same set of buttons. Still, there are a few that you will often see:
1. Add new Opens the creation page of the current context: new product, new product category, new order, etc.
2. Recommended Modules and Services Opens a pop-in window containing the modules available in the current context. Not very useful in my opinion.
3. Help Opens the inline documentation for the current page – or "contextual help".
Many of the back office forms are validated with buttons at the bottom of the screen:
1. Save Saves the content of the current page and returns to the list of existing items.
2. Save and stay Saves the content of the current page and keeps the page open.
3. Cancel Returns to the list of existing items.
Lists of products, categories, customers, etc. have their own set of buttons to manage the listed items:
1. Add new Creates a new item in the current context.
2. Export Downloads a CSV file of all the items.
3. Import Sends you to the CSV Import page, from where you can import your CSV files.
4. Refresh List Reloads the list of items to display the latest changes.
5. Show SQL Query Provides the SQL query to reproduce your search or filter in your own SQL manager.
6. Export to SQL Manager Opens PrestaShop's SQL Manager tool (in the "Advanced Parameters") menu, from which you can query PrestaShop's database with SQL statements.
Dashboard
And the last part of this tutorial is the Dashboard itself. As I said before, here is the homepage of the back office. It can feel crowded to a first-time user, but in a few minutes, you will see that it's not.
If you click on the icon, as shown in the following screenshot, under the PrestaShop logo, it collapses the menu and you'll have a wider page.
You still have access to the menu but only with icons and if you click on any menu the submenu will show up like the following screenshot:
There are two main parts in the dashboard: The date bar and the stats.
By default, the dashboard uses demo data so that you can better visualize what the stats are for at the beginning. When using PrestaShop for a real online store, you must disable this demo data so that your real data is used. Deactivate the "Demo mode" option at the top right of the screen, next to the "Help" icon.
But for now, we leave that enabled so I can show you some data.
At the top of the Dashboard, there is a single bar that helps you choose the period of time for the currently displayed dashboard statistics. Three sets of options are available:
- 1. Current day, month, or year.
- 2. The previous day, month, or year.
- 3. Precise date selection.
To choose a period of time, choose the start and end date on the calendar, or you can type the dates in this format: YYYY-MM-DD in these text boxes. Click "Apply" to see the changes.
On the right column, there are some links to PrestaShop resources.
Dashboard Activity
And on the left column, you see some data from the Dashboard Activity module. Stats like online visitors and active shopping carts in the last 30 minutes. Pending orders, return/exchange, abandoned carts, and out-of-stock products:
You can check new messages and product reviews like the following screenshot:
New customers and subscriptions to your newsletter will be shown here:
And the last data is related to your traffic. Visits, unique visitors, and traffic sources.
Dashboard goals module
In the center column, there are 3 sets of statistics. Forcast, Product and sales, and Dashboard.
The forecast from the Dashboard goals module. By clicking on its configuration icon here, you can set goals for the coming month. Type your desired traffic, conversion rate, and average cart value, and the sales column is calculated based on these numbers automatically. Set these numbers for every month and click save.
With every sale, the data is updated. If you exceed the goal or do not reach the goal bars, that are shown in the following screenshot, will show you exact numbers. Remember, only validated orders will be counted.
This data is only for your information and does not affect the behavior of your shop and sales.
Dashboard Products module
The next one is some statistics from the Dashboard Products module. This block presents you with a table of your latest orders and a ranking of your products: bestsellers, most viewed, and top searches (as searched in your shop's search form, not from search engines).
Dashboard Trend module
And finally the main block of information on the dashboard from the Dashboard Trend module.
It shows sales, orders, cart average value, visits, conversion rate, and net profit. How does it calculate the net profit? It's an estimate based on the expenses you enter on the configuration page of this block. To open the configuration page, click on the gear icon in the previous screenshot and set fees for each one of your payment and shipping methods.
In the other settings block, you can set an average gross margin percentage. As mentioned here, this value is only used to calculate the Dashboard net profit. There is another field for additional fees per order.
Click save and then the approximate net profit will be calculated based on your sales, wholesale prices you enter for each product, and the fees you entered just before. And if you hover your mouse over this chart you will see the details.
That's it. You are now more familiar with the admin area of PrestaShop 1.7 and hopefully can find your way through it.